


what's hers and his, the way you are

by carlemon



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Canon - Book & Movie Combination, Drabble, Established Relationships & Friendships, F/F, F/M, Movie Night, Movie Timeline, Non-Sexual Intimacy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-20 12:26:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13146675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carlemon/pseuds/carlemon
Summary: It was becoming onehellof a storm— nothing like that of ‘88 (and not, they would someday reflect, like the one that’d follow in ‘16 and nearobliterateDerry entirely) but a real doozy nonetheless.Bev could really appreciate Vic, the mettle of him, to show up despite it.





	what's hers and his, the way you are

**Author's Note:**

> title from RAC's cheap sunglasses.

_March 1994, Derry_

Luckily, by the time the storm hit Gretta Keene's West Broadway McMansion, she and Bev were very much safe and sound within, armed against it with fists digging glittery nails into the plush carpet of its impenetrably dry bay-windowed lounge. (Collapsed! Redrawn! Remade into a halcyon fairy-lit haven of Egyptian linen and gaudy throw pillows!) In the eye of it, they tittered and bickered and sought solace in one another like girls, (they _were_ girls) and like birds (they were _less_ birds). Swaddled into all the soft lushness, the _decadence_ and nicety the Keene household had to offer, Bev giggled into the humid space between them, mouth seamed straight with smears of Gretta’s cherry gloss. “No,” she gasped, and her hands found the outlines of her ribs, tracing paths worn well by Gretta’s, chipping her fresh manicure. “No, stop, I can’t take it anymore, I _can’t_ —”

Gretta rocked forward on her scabby knees marred by grass-stain and turf scrapes. A dark eyebrow danced at her forehead as she hovered her mouth close enough to Bev’s to suffuse the meagre space between them with the artificial smells of cherry and bubblegum. Like taffy her harsh-edged whisper stretched sleepily in the pleasant quiet, prickling Bev’s neck. Sticky, sticky, sticky. A girl could lose herself in it. Bev just might. “No, you don’t get it—” Gretta whispered fervently. “You don’t, okay— listen.”

“God, I _can’t_ —”

“Listen, right— and then he goes: _was that guy your boyfriend?_ ” Her voice dropped an octave into the approximation of the suitor's whose clumsy attempt at courting her was going to be keeping Bev on the precipice of hysterics for the rest of the night, husky and ludicrously brazen. “He goes: —and he’s sober, oh my god, Bev, he’s _sober_ — _have you slept with that guy?_ And, god, he makes _this_ face—”

The expression she made was so bizarrely doleful Bev did not so much laugh as choke out her mirth, coughing furiously into her palm, Gretta’s chest, their gossamer-lined blanket fort. “—He makes _this_ face, and he goes: _I thought you were a nice girl. I thought you weren’t like those other girls_.”

“Oh, guh- _god_ —”

“He goes _: just give me a chance. I’ll take you somewhere nice. I promise._ And I go—” Gretta puffed up; there was suddenly too much of her to maintain their distance. Her blouse flopped open away from her chest, tickling Bev’s nose. Bev, too busy trying not to laugh to sneeze, found to no one’s surprise at all she didn't quite mind the intrusion, instead nestling into the space Gretta made for her. With her head against Gretta’s chest she could hear her heartbeat, the surge of adrenaline coursing through her as they hurtled merrily along to the end of her story in a whitewater-rapid rush. All of her was rolling muscle and sinew, easy fluid _confident_. “And I go: _sure, you creep. My_ girlfriend _wouldn’t like that._ And _he_ goes—” Her hand slid, slippery, ‘round Bev’s face, cupping all of it, coming to a gentle stop at the froth of curls at her nape. “He asks—”

“Please don’t—”

“ _—Wanna go for a threesome?_ ” This, coupled with the distortion of her cadence and features, the curl entirely _revolted_ of her mouth, punched easily out of Bev her blasé composure: gales of laughter shredded her apart, scrunching up her abdomen into a taut little ball. She damn near choked on her gob of nicotine gum; almost  _wept_ with laughter, hard snorts of cackling joy flaring her nostrils. Gretta tucked her nose into the top of her head, her Tiffany bracelet teasing apart the folds of Bev's bathrobe with flashes of cold against her flesh. “It's good  _you_ think it’s funny. It was fuck-awful.”

“I’m gonna _pee_ , stop.” An idle fist came for Gretta’s shoulder, the hit awkward, chicken-armed by their proximity. Gretta caught it neatly, curved it around her neck and Bev went soft and malleable as putty, drunk on synthetic, sugary smell, giggling giggling giggling. Freshly shampooed and manicured, slight-damp and warm with sweat, rain, shower-water, giggling and giggling and giggling. “Just letting you know, I would _not_ be into that. You know, just to clear that up.”

“Yeah, no shit!” Laughter geysered, spilt from the door of their fortress. Bev’s mouth crimped against Gretta’s silk blouse as it shuddered and struggled to contain her yawning catlike limber. Gretta Keene, easy fluid _confident_ , secure in a way Bev'd only had to claw at and approximate prior. (Pull a Richie-Rich-Records-Tozier! Fake it 'til you make it! 'til graduation! Pray God'll be good to you, that He won't render you bronchitic, emphysematous, dead-in-a-ditch 'til at _least_ then.)

In all honesty, Bev could scarcely give a fuck for the movie or for the storm, much preferring _(relishing_ ) the sensations of late girlhood and being all-girl, deliciously inane. If it weren't raining so hard outside (cats and dogs, dogs and cats and _sullage_ pouring from the gutters, from the damn _skies)_ they'd most likely be outside like good white-picket chicks making daisy-chains, pruning violets, drinking out of crystal pitchers and matching tumbler-sets of spiked cider and dandelion wine and rum. (Rich-kid bevs for a Rich Kid's Bev.) (Bev laughed a little, a little sleepily or deliriously, to herself.) But because there was no way in hell the daisies hadn't been all but drowned in their neat carcades of flower pots, they were instead inside, tipsy on rosewater-pink cough syrup, freshly fluorescent in Gretta’s _(Vic’s)_  dress-up jacket the bland fecund green of swampland and noxious weeds. Rain drummed hard outside on Gretta’s turrets, dampening her lawn and their sneakers and sandals leaned atop the welcome mat. It was becoming one _hell_ of a storm— nothing like that of ‘88 (and not, they would someday reflect, like the one that’d follow in ‘16 and near _obliterate_ Derry entirely) but a real doozy nonetheless.

Bev could really appreciate Vic, the _mettle_ of him, to show up despite it. He pelted in halfway through a commercial hollering the benefits of Advil, (”God, hockey season starts in a month, like— god, I’ll need a fucking _ton_ of those!” "You could get 'em in bulk,") a sopping rat-thing — _almost_ — as tightly swaddled as Bev was in Gretta’s linen in his _(her)_ bedazzled denim jacket. They peeped, mildly bemused, from their fort, faces cast in soft dusky shadow. Vic’s cleats dripped thick marshy mud into the carpet as he dragged himself in from the storm's grasping fingers and long tortured wails of torrent and gust that ceased to exist the precise moment the door slammed shut behind him.

Bev smiled, her face in Gretta’s chest, her cheek propped high against Gretta's breasts. Vic was too fucked to spare that any regard, too sodden, too damn _miserable_ by the looks of it. “Spring showers?”

Gretta gave his _(her)_ jacket a sad look as he shrugged it off his shoulders, whipped it across the room. It oozed rainwater down the sofa in slowfat dribbles and droplets, revealing in its absence a wrinkled nicotine patch in the dead centre of his pale forearm. He curved into their orbit much the same, (easy, _slow_ , viscous. _Comfortable_ in a practiced way) hunkering down onto drippy thighs to face them. ( _Squelch_ goes Victor _. Ooh, yuck!_ wailed Sally Mueller in her head. Bev giggled, and promptly choked and coughed on an overpowering waft of fruity eau de Gretta.) Vic shook a fist out that Bev bumped leisurely, and she held her breath and tucked inward when he lurched forward to kiss Gretta, making space for him out of that between her and Gretta’s chest. There were worse ways to suffocate. There’d been worse storms.

 _Nevertheless_ — “God you are damp. Did you drown out there?” Gretta was— smiling. Tickled awake, a gust of Bev’s just-subsided wild gales of humour lashed out against her ribs, making her snort and laugh, _mild_  lax easy _comfortable_. Vic hazarded her an unamused glance, a glimpse of a mouth curved sharply upward.

“Fucking _feel_ like I did. Might need you a new jacket. Sorry.” He didn't sound so sorry— sorry he got marooned out in the wet, maybe. Bev looked over at it, a sad ratty mess drooping rhinestones and blue-white fingers of denim that clutched at the sofa’s leather seat. “You got a—?”

This last catch of inquiry was directed at her, but she barely got a grin all-teeth in as to deny him a bent Winston before Gretta shot him a sharp darting glance, chin jerking sharply at the kitchen. “ _Not_ in here, not on your life, okay? You set off a fucking smoke alarm last week,” she added when Vic deflated a little. (He had; Bev had been present. They’d sort of flailed about as Gretta pounced on the alarms from room to room. They were cut of the same cloth, almost, she and Vic Criss, and that cloth did not always employ working smoke alarms in their places of residence.) “There’s nicotine gum in the kitchen.” She glanced down at Bev, who supplied a blasé open-mouthed expression in response, showcasing the thick gobbet of offwhite gum stuck between her teeth.

Vic’s teeth worked, pinched, fretted at his lip. Something like a grin there. Something downright amicable, if not _slightly_ unruffled. (Who could blame him? There was a _thunk_ outside, muffled but sticky and dense. Cats and dogs, dogs and cats. A felled branch of the Keenes' magnificent oak through the attic.) He heaved out a half-tortured, _poor-soul_ kind of sigh, and slouched off to the kitchen. In his absence Bev pried herself slightly from Gretta, widening the entrance to their fort as Gretta petted around blindly for the remote. From the kitchen cabinets rattled, doors slammed. “Oh my god, it’s on top of the fucking microwave!” shrieked Gretta, half-laughing already, and Bev made a strange cawing noise strangled by her comfortable bonelessness in Gretta’s slumping embrace.

Cabinets rattled, doors slammed. Then: “This tastes like _shit_ ,” grouched Vic.

“Wanna know what else tastes like shit? Wanna know what _I_ deal with?” She offered Bev a wink subtly unwholesome, _un_ -Grettalike, that shimmered off her smudged eyeshadow. Bev tried at a gum-bubble, the attempt slicking her lips with unpleasant sharp minty taste.

“You know, it actually does, Gretta...”

“Yeah, well, welcome to _my_ world.” There was a puff of breath over the back of her neck, Gretta’s nimble fingers scraping damp scraggly snarls of hair from her forehead, (”You’ve got to let me _do_ something with this, you know that, right?” Again from the kitchen came Vic’s cackling yap of, “Shit, you better _not,”)_ a chip and pretzel bowl pulled from under the sofa. Idly, Bev sucked the peppery bite out of her gum, wringing stiff bubbles out of it that Gretta popped with immaculate nails. As spring showers gone awol blasted the windows and doors, her head migrated to Gretta’s lap, cheek propped atop her own freckled arm, a grazed elbow (still stinging slightly from a hot shower almost a half-hour ago) jutting out their fort’s tiny window.

“By the way,” called Gretta, “We’re watching Curse of Frankenstein.” She was met immediately with a protracted disgruntled grunt, a clatter of plates. Bev ate a chip. “Vic? You okay? Vic- _tah?_ Vic?”

“ _Bit_ my _tongue_. Fucking Frankenstein, are you _serious?_ ”

“ _Hey_ , now. It’s retro night,” offered Bev. Vic spat or muttered or sighed an oath that Gretta had a merry little snicker at, (”Don’t you like the fifties, Vic- _tah?”_ “We all know how I feel about that movie, it’s a pile of shit, _thank you very fucking much_ ,”) wringing out a hand in a mad flail to flip through the channels. Bev saw some shitty cooking show, more commercials for pharmaceuticals, (one sponsored by the Keene apothecary, no less) before they settled on Frankenstein again.

Gretta hummed around a mouthful of chips. “Creature of the Black Lagoon’s on too, you priss, if that’s any better.” Bev clicked her tongue, tasting sour cream and onion intermingled with the cherry, the vanilla, off her oiled lips.

“Oh, _I_ can’t, I’m seeing that with Richie next week.” Sounding unfathomably distant, Vic hawked out an oozy expression of vague contempt that went down the sink with a wet splat. Gretta huffed, puffing her disappointment against Bev’s cheek in the mawkish sort of pantomime Bev could smell sharply off her in between the tussle of Juicy Fruit and lip gloss and cough syrup and kirsch; it was all show, charged by habit in lieu of any real disdain. Bev grinned a crooked lopsided grin slack at the edges up at her. “It’ll be retro night, you know?”

“Fuckin’ retro night.” Vic came from the kitchen like a ghost, sliding onto his haunches, his knees, into their fortress with a jittering movement cut off by the instant of lightning striking the weathervane or a turret, making the houselights flicker. He and Bev exchanged tired smiles (hers, wrought supple by Gretta’s fond ministrations, an afternoon of tending to her indoor daisies; his, just thawing out) and she let her legs be lifted up and slung across his lap as he climbed and folded himself into their twinkling fort. Gretta leaned her head against his shoulder, smiling blithely into his half-huffing aggrieved mouth as they kissed— this alone threatened the foundation of their fortress and for it moment it teetered, its Hellenic pillars of schoolbooks twitching hazardously, but Vic yielded easy, and it managed to withstand (but only just) the sudden intrusion of his sharp-shouldered fine-boned presence..

They collapsed together, a scheduled demolition done in a gasp. Vic curled into Gretta, constructing a strange steeple over Bev planked supine over the both of them. Bev petted his shoulder, palming an easy line over his cheek (caressing it, even) and got for her trouble a series of awkward movements against her bare (warm) thigh that only served to make her acutely aware of just how long he'd been caught outside. (In the cold! The miserable damp! The worst fucking storm since motherfucking '88!) Fingertips like acute spears of miry cold chopped up and down absentmindedly over her hip. She tossed a glance upward and saw looming over her the rise and fall of his heaving _(thawing)_ chest in his old Derry High jersey, a gob of gum about half the size of her fist being swished from side to side of his mouth. “Take a picture," he told her. "It’ll last longer.”

She smiled around her next bubble. “Or you could keep your eyes on the screen.” _Pop!_ Gretta’s hand drifted up from Bev’s mouth to smooth over his new pomp, undone by rainwater and grime.

“God, you really need a touch-up.”

“’s _fine_.”

“Oh, yeah, sure it is. _‘s fine!_ Just look at it, huh? It’s fucking _dandy!_ ” Her high titter curdled in the sudden sour wet Vic'd brought with him. Bev spat her gum into her palm, rubbing it between finger and thumb, and nabbed a chocolate-covered pretzel. “I can see your roots, _omigod_. I don’t think blonde’s working for you. Maybe we should try ginger, like Bev.” (Here a long pregnant pause in which Vic warmed and Gretta boiled over against her.) “Chicks _love_ redheads, huh?”

“Aw, Gretta.” Bev palmed her gum back into her mouth, giving Gretta a sticky smile only barely shy now. On-screen the little blurb about Frankenstein faded into an old barren valley not at all dissimilar to that formed by Gretta and Vic’s touching thighs. “Guys, c’mon—”

“I’ll look like, like a _shit_ —”

 _“Ha!_ Did you just say Bev looks like a shit? _Prick!_ ”

“ _Guys_.” 

Long glances hastily averted bounced between them. Eventually they relented— Gretta’s left hand curled back, all tender, into her crown, her right coming to a playful jittery rest at Vic’s waist. (That’s power, that was. Bev took another pretzel, printing it on the inside of her cheek with a grin.) By her side Vic crumpled into Gretta's shoulder, one of his hands ambling over to Bev’s hip. Hovering at her lazy hand almost loose in the sleeve of her _(Gretta's)_ bathrobe. He blinked, slow, and told her, “If you spit, I’ll fucking leave.”

"You _wouldn't_."

"Hey. Try me."

So she held his hand loosely, scrabbling her fingers over his palms. Gretta idled and stretched in slow drippy liquid moments, kicking apart the curtains of their dimlit fort to get a better peek at the cellar looming across the screen, the group of high-collared aristocratic fucks presiding at stage right not at all unlike the Bowie-Keenes and Muellers and Gordons. Gum-glued together and more or less speechless, Bev giggled, getting a heavy-lidded, humoured look from Vic for it. On cue, Gretta puckered her lips at his temple, slicking there a lingering, pinkish pout.

 _Where's my kiss, tough guy?_ What she said instead was almost the same: “God, cheer up, tough guy. Once The Chase's out at the cinemas, I can call Marcie and Pete, and we can all hold hands during the scary bits, okay? Big fucking cuddle pile.” She squeezed Vic's free hand. Bev proffered for him a pretzel, curling the fingers of his other hand around it. For a moment she drifted to her Winstons, safe in the pocket of her bathrobe, but Gretta caught her eye with a hard pink pout, a slight tremble at her wide mouth that threatened _no_ kisses and _no_ mercy and taunts and banter _unending,_ and Bev yielded blinking innocently, showing empty hands. Old movies weren't entirely the niche she tended to surrender to come the long lonely lights spent in friendly company, (they were more Mike's forte, she thought) and she wanted to enjoy this.

“Fucking retro night. Fucking _Frankenstein_. Out of everything _,_ ” muttered Vic and Bev sucked her gum-bubble into her grin entirely as she laughed, puffing away from her forehead ember-red curls mussed by Gretta's kind, unceasing touch.

**Author's Note:**

> i needed to get this out of my system before writing about literally anything else but hey talk at me about everyone getting along and these three getting along.


End file.
